Set in stone

Sunday

CAMBRIDGE - After 26 centuries, the bearded Assyrian king once again drives his spear into a charging lion – not on a hunt outside his grand Mesopotamian palace but in the Harvard Semitic Museum.

The grandeur and brutality of the ancient Near East come alive through 17 stunning bas relief sculptures of royal life, which once adorned the walls of now-destroyed palaces but have been recast by Harvard University students and staff in an innovative project that opens a stunning window into the past.

Recreating royal propaganda through modern technology, “From Stone to Silicone: Recasting Mesopotamian Monuments” transforms the museum’s third-floor Atrium Gallery into a palace, an imperial hunt and a battleground as old as 800 B.C. and as contemporary as tomorrow’s headlines.

“I think the art of those times was awe-inspiring,” said Adam Aja, assistant curator of collections, who oversaw the project. “I think there are things here to inspire visitors to learn more about this era.”

Aja explained the newly fabricated sculptures were made by about 40 students from plaster casts secured near the end of the 19th century by David Gordon Lyon, founding curator of the Semitic Museum, which was established in 1889 to promote study of Semitic languages and archaeological exploration. It houses more than 40,000 artifacts, mostly from museum-sponsored excavations in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Tunisia.

The plaster casts Lyon secured from museums in London, Paris and Berlin, he said, were copies of original casts of sculptured stone masterpieces that once covered the walls of throne rooms and banquet halls in huge Assyrian palaces in Nineveh and Nimrud in what is now northern Iraq.

Students taking a course at Harvard titled “Ancient Near East 103: Ancient Lives” worked with Aja to fashion new casts from resin that are lighter and more durable than the crumbling century-old copies of originals.

Visitors do not need any special familiarity with ancient history to be moved by the beauty and power of the objects on display.

Deftly retouched and presented to appear aged rather than in their original bright colors, these sculpted reliefs will transport visitors to scenes of royal pomp and ancient violence that seem at once lost in time but agonizingly real.

“The ancient world was polychromatic, not bone white,” said Aja who has supervised archaeological digs in Israel, Turkey and England. “But I wanted to highlight our collection is from the ancient Near East.”

Visitors to the high-ceilinged gallery will see scenes of remarkable detail and craft that glorified the martial triumphs and civic achievements of kings such as Assurnasuirpal (883-859 B.C.) and Assurbanipal (668-627 B.C.) that would only have been viewed by royalty, aristocrats or high-ranking officials visiting the palaces, the ruins of which were destroyed by ISIS in 2015.

Older and less popularly known than ancient Greece and Rome, Assyria was a major Mesopotamian kingdom and empire that existed from about the 25th century B.C. to around 609 before the Common Era. It was located on the Tigris River in modern northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and the northwestern border areas of Iran, constituting large portion of what’s now known as the Mesopotamian “cradle of civilization” where cities and written language first appeared.

Visiting from with his daughter who hopes to attend Harvard, Donald Messier was surprised to learn a scene of soldiers swimming underwater, using animal bladders for oxygen, had been recently made. “It looks ancient to me,’’ said the Oregon resident. “I couldn’t have told the difference.”

HSM Director Peter Der Manuelian said by fabricating resin casts from the plaster originals the exhibit aims “to use the tools of the future to show the past.”

“Nowhere else in New England can people see this collection, learn how it was collected and experience a different world view,’’ he said. “My role as director is to bring people in close contact with our collection to bring alive the origin of things.”

Der Manuelian, who is also a professor of Egyptology, observed the Assyrian reliefs were specifically sculpted by master artisans “to present an overwhelming spectacle” of the king’s magnificence and power to impress important visitors.

He observed kings were often depicted as larger than other men and, when in battle or a hunt, were portrayed as “emotionless compared to their anguished enemies,” whether human or animal.

“They are royal propaganda meant to display the king’s prosperity and power,” said Der Manuelian.

While several reliefs picture the king hunting lions from horseback or a chariot, several others depict scenes that seem to echo present-day realities in the turbulent region.

In one, soldiers drive adult and child refugees they have conquered from the Elamite city of Din-Sharri in a scene reminiscent of the mass civilian migrations in present-day Syria. In another, Assyrian soldiers lead four prisoners about to be beheaded before an official.

An elaborate bas relief shows prisoners from the rebellious city of Lachish forced to kneel before an Assyrian king sitting on his throne before being led away to slavery.

However, Der Manuelian cautioned against imposing contemporary political crises onto ancient history.

“There have been centuries of peace at various times. You can choose to look at the chaos or achievements,” he said.

Der Manuelian noted that students who made the new resin casts also ate a three-course meal and drank beer they prepared from ancient Assyrian recipes and listened to the music of that era.

“The beer tasted different from Michelob Light but the point was to bring (students) up close and personal with those times and show a common humanity,’’ he said.

Unlike the old slogan, “Weekends were made for Michelob,” “From Stone to Silicone” will carry visitors through centuries of glory and conflict into the throne rooms and battle fields of another culture and age to see humans very much like themselves portrayed in art of stunning beauty and power.